The fairy tales of early warning research

Abstract

Policy-makers and academics keep failing to anticipate social upheavals and their manifold consequences. This holds true for the Arab Spring in 2011, as it does for missing popular protests that made Ukrainian President Yanukovych leave the country in 2014. While Western governments were heavily criticized for missing these dynamics, scholars were mostly spared. This paper argues that social scientists have not learnt the lessons. The rise of large-scale protest movements and the radicalization dynamics coming with them will be missed again – no matter what time and location. This claim will be unfolded on the basis of Syria and Ukraine where non-violent protests were the beginning of current violent intrastate conflict. By pinpointing inconsistencies with prominent early warning instruments (Fragile States Index, Polity IV, International Crisis Group, Heidelberg Conflict Barometer), implications for better tool boxes will be discussed.

Keywords:

• Ukraine
• Syria
• protests
• early warning
• crisis prevention
• escalation

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers, Elena Kropatcheva, Daniela Pisoiu, and Michael Brzoska for useful comments on earlier drafts of this article.

Notes

1. These four early warning tools vary from ‘purely’ scholarly research on the one hand and applied/policy-oriented analyses on the other. As such, audiences and aims might differ. A crucial argument of this paper is the observation that both the scholarly as well as policy-oriented approaches fail to predict conflict, regardless of different and/or overlapping modes of knowledge production.

2. Polity IV assesses a state's democracy level based on the evaluation of elections for competitiveness, openness and level of participation. For each year and country, a polity score is determined. It ranges from −10 to + 10, with −10 to −6 corresponding to autocracies, −5 to 5 corresponding to anocracies, and 6 to 10 to democracies. See Polity IV, ‘Country Reports 2013’, http://www.systemicpeace.org/polity/polity4.htm, accessed 23 October 2015.